


Wrists get tired rewriting futures

by briath



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: M/M, a classic "they were probably happy once", spoilers for marielda finale i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 12:03:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11714037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briath/pseuds/briath
Summary: In which Samot's final act of reconfiguration is the revision of eschatology, and Aubrey helps.





	Wrists get tired rewriting futures

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Careful Hands by Sleeping at Last.

_What if we could create with it; what if we could convince it not to consume?_

His heart is pounding in his ears, and Marielda stretched out before him: an unforgiving and loud piece of machinery, all golds and greens and grey. Samothes' city. Maelgwyn's.

Somebody clears their throat. Samot curls his toes and tries to slow his breathing. But it's just Aubrey, approaching him from the side—Samot can see her in his peripheral vision, reaching out a hand to rest it, lightly, on his shoulder.

Samot two nights ago knows and remembers that she is short, briefly reflecting how easy it is for him to reach her, how hard vice versa, before he realizes his own bent over state. The railing of the balcony is almost too-hot against his upper arms, and though Aubrey scarcely has reason to trust him, her hand on his arm fills him with such abrupt relief that he starts to laugh. It is fit-like and desperate. Aubrey doesn't move away. Her tail twitches.

Slowly, in increments, he calms down. He bends forward towards her; she raises ever so slightly higher on her toes to meet him. The sounds of the city quieten. Aubrey speaks first. "I'm sorry, if, sorry I interrupted you it's just there are people asking for you inside and since YOU'RE the king now and, well, they started to ask Castille? If she knew what they were to name "our Lord Samot's city"? Cause she's a pala-din, only she's been staring into space looking sad and..you look sad, too, and I just...wanted to help," she trails off, staring down at her hands which are twisted in her skirt. Samot feels himself smile.

Samot catches himself in an unrestrained grin, feels himself reach out, and rest a hand on her head (carefully), and rattles back into place through his shaking. "Of course," he says. "Thank you, Aubrey." 

And he looks out at their city for one last time, letting himself feel with all the weight of it how little Samothes would have wished him here in all their later years, letting himself taste the bitterness of the fondness of it until it curls up like smoke before the evening sun and vanishes. 

He feels all of it fiercely, now, as he always has, but with his passing years grows more and more admiring of those who fake such fierceness, who choose and don't destroy with it; Aubrey is a ramrod streak of belief and faith by his side, precisive, ingenuity. 

It would be nice, Samot thinks, if this could be more than an ending. 

And he knows what this city is. What it should be, and he stares down into Aubrey's wide open face instead, less pre-planned, re-arranged roads, before he pulls back. Aubrey shifts her weight forward. He can, he thinks, do better than this. He will. This isn't—the shadows running over the streets—an ending. "Aubrey," he says, "Would you stay with me?"

_We turned its time around on itself until the red pulled thin enough I could reach my finger through. It only burned a little_

Before everything and the future pulled apart like onions, they would meet in private. They spent long, unending hours in each other's company, each inhabiting his own worlds with his own reasons—but in that space, they made each other a language, an ill-jointed language of love. 

When Samothes shows Samot how to build a tower he has his hand on Samot's waist while brick by brick before them collapses into existing. 

Samot watches Samothes' face instead to see the pride in it. A tower, Samot thinks idly, squeezing Samothes' hand, is no place for a school. They had had that argument: Samot red-faced, yelling about standards and isolationism and Gods—he thinks, wryly, that Gods and mortals both cling to them; treating towers as proof necessitated of their closeness to the freedom and entropy of air, which they so often confuse with freedom. 

Schools, in Samot's opinion, had to be open. Expansive!

But Samothes, he knew, didn't see knowledge as reproducible, inherently mutable; knowledge to him was just a prototype. Knowledge, as Samot finally understood only after he'd yelled himself hoarse, was a blueprint: Something to keep safe. Oh, to share—how he glowed with it—but the process of it secret and his own. 

Samot had asked him, once, before he had understood this, whether Samothes truly believed he could keep knowledge from spreading, whether he understood that locking it up somewhere just corroded the foundations—Samothes had blinked at him in confusion. 

Once, after another fight (Samot could remember only barely) it had been Samothes who had been shaking and flushed after it, had borne him, hands under his thighs, to the nearest wall, where they'd held each other for endless stretches of time until their anger lessened—

Their school would be a brick wall. Samot sighs. Well. He was not good at pushing for nothing.

He lets himself slowly drift in and out of his thoughts.

When he blinks back into the workshop, he finds a small model of a tower by his feet, a bunch of bricks, and Samothes smiling down at him. In his dizziness, it is almost impossible to bear. “Love, where did you go just then? Don't you know it makes me lonely when you leave?”

Samot huffs indignantly and reaches up with his right hand to press a thumb into the up-curl of Samothes' mouth. Samothes' eyes are so, so fond as he watches him. It is too much. He will not have it. He lifts up on his feet and tries to follow it up with a kiss, but he has to drop his right hand to stabilize himself against Samothes' shoulder. Samothes shakes his head, still grinning like he knows something Samot doesn't. It is infuriating. Still he lets him takes his hand, pressing a slow, warm kiss against the crown of Samot's knuckles. His knees wobble.

From far away, he hears Samothes' voice: “Little wolf. How well you have tamed me.” 

Then it fades away.

Samol is laughing at them from the head of the table, one arm crossed over his chest.

Samot feels his teeth gnash: What he wouldn't give to have a pen right now; The thing about cultures, how you can write them into being and knowing deep in the core of what he knows he is and was that somebody also wrote them. 

The trepidation that, unfailingly, follows all creation.

"Can't believe you boys figured you could rewrite the nature of fire, of all things. Fire! Man, could I tell you thing about fire..but don't none of y'all listen to this old man, here, just make your own--ridiculous--plans an' machinations. Carry on, my boys."

Samot shrugs. He doesn't think it was that unthinkable of a thought. They had deemed it worth a shot. 

Besides, now he has two more pages on transmutations and colour to hand to that mage at the university. 

The mage had called fire, "wine which drinks." Samot had laughed. 

Samothes had suggested stasis, for architectural purposes. Samot had shaken his head, but, in the end, been curious enough to try it. It hadn't worked, except for a small teardrop-shaped piece of amber that now held its own peculiar warmth and flickered when looked at. 

He glances to his side. Samothes is bent forward slightly to listen to Samol, deep rings under his eyes, but smiling, a slight blush on his cheek. Samot's hand stills in the air. He swallows. Abruptly, it feels like the wine has gone more to this head than usual; there suddenly seems to be a chill in the air that is stealing all his sense. 

Samothes turns to look at him; Samot stares back, eyes digging into his face, watching Samothes' blush deepen and raising his glass to cover his own. Samol has gone quiet. 

A long time ago, Samot, much younger than he is now, had watched his father tilt back his head to look up into the trees and say, as if he was speaking to himself: “I can feel all their hearts beat.”

Samot skids closer to understanding that every day he sees his family, sees it in the eyes—suspicious, admiring—of his colleagues at the university, the whisperings of half-made words in his sleep, the wolves that come to paw at his doorstep for him to find in the morning, but rarely does he understand it better than he does right now, with his husband half-drunk and smiling next to him, steady and sticky with sweat and grease. He hooks his fingers deeply into Samothes' thigh; watches his face—

He sees Samol get up and chuckle, and with a wave begin to head out—He gives a nod in acknowledgment, promises himself to ask about his limp next time—resumes— 

They are in Samot's room, equipped by Samothes himself; and he is so very conscious of it now, hearing the hitch in Samothes' breath. He leans more of his weight into his fingers, fascinated to see how far he can reach, to see how deep Samothes will let him. His thigh is warm under Samot's hand, tense against the push of it. He feels Samothes cup a hand round his neck, and his heart is pounding in his ears. They have this night, and then, he fervently wishes, forever.

 

_Since Fire  
already behaves in a time-stopping, unpredictable but patterned way_

_my love, that's just you._

_There's still so much work to be done!_

**Author's Note:**

> Van de winter wordt het koud en als de sneeuw smelt  
> Dan rij ik naar het zuiden  
> Ik heb hier iets te bewijzen  
> (Eefje de Visser).


End file.
